Leareth is lying in a stone room, and nothing in particular is happening right now, and he is mostly succeeding at not having any thoughts. It's a fine moment. He is not, literally this second, being tortured. This is not useful at all for predicting what the next moment is going to be like, of course, or for whether 'quiet stone room' has any particular resemblance to reality, but Leareth has gotten pretty good at not being curious.
"Hello," says the girl. She is dressed and has her hair done up not like a Herald but like a Quendi - if not a Quendi who is very creative with their braiding situation - but is obviously human. "I don't expect you to believe any statements I make about what's going on, but are you willing to entertain a hypothetical about what you'd want if some things were the case?"
Leareth tries not to hear the question and fails. All of that would be baffling if he cared, which he's trying not to. And kind of failing at, because this is different and things are happening and a large chunk of his mind has decided that 'be terrified' is the appropriate response to this. He can at least try not to have any preferences about whether or not he's terrified.
He does not answer the question or respond in any way.
"Yeah, that was a long shot." She looks at Not Tortured Leareth. "I'm willing to consider you a source of advance directive if we have to. I don't know how long you want to wait, it might be letting him lie there for a long time helps and Elf timelines aren't going to be very predictive so it might not be years, but..."
"Hmm. I think I would be inclined to wait at least a week, that seems cheap, but - what are the other options here, can you do things without his cooperation at all?"
(Who is she talking to - okay what - all right, that is getting even less plausible, if plausibility were a thing he could judge based on observations, which it isn't so he cuts it off and stops trying.)
"His cooperation only matters if I want him to specifically be asleep, the limit is his consent. He's already been brutalized for I don't know how long."
Nod. "I think I am inclined to wait. I did not know it was possible for a version of me to - be like this. We could give it a week and see if he is better or worse or the same?" Pause. "Is he going to eat if we leave him alone? He does not seem inclined to take actions at all."
(What an astute observation, fake-copy-of-himself, he's going to keep not doing anything until they get bored of this.)
"He might not eat, though, again, I've only seen ones who got as far as Valinor and those do so I don't have much useful experience there. I can hit him with the healing spell every day and he probably won't starve to death, though that's inconvenient and the spell isn't meant for that and perhaps you have a better idea."
(That isn't how Healing OR spells work at all even noticing that is too close to curiosity and he is, instead, going to do not that - although Melkor really ought to have dragged enough context on Velgarth's magic out of his head to get it right - he's going to stop trying to make inferences about things now–)
"I mean, I could in theory use compulsions to prompt him to eat, but it is not exactly difficult to predict that I would hate that if someone did it to me, so..."
"Yeah. I could try to develop something specific for it and might have it inside a week but I also really want to check over my interplanar transit to find out what went wrong - I think my friend's anxious that having spent a fraction of a second in Utumno is going to make me wonder forever if I'm still there, the mistarget could have gone way worse."
Nod. "We could try your current Healing spell, and have someone assessing him with Healing-Sight to see if he appears to be deteriorating over time, and direct research efforts accordingly."
Or give up and use a minimally invasive compulsion for it until you figure something out: he adds in Mindspeech, :I do not wish to alarm him more by saying so now:
Sigh. "Actually, I think I would not endorse risking physical damage to myself in order to avoid an experience I dispreferred, and...probably that means he would feel the same way, in principle. So - hmm, I think I can do a conditional one that will only have effect when we bring him food, that way I will not have to come back and repeatedly do it..."
He gets to work, doing the simplest, action-compelling variant; imagining himself in this situation, he thinks he would prefer it at least be obvious what was happening, and not instead have it be trying to fool him about what he wants....
- scaredscaredscaredscaredscared - this reaction doesn't make a lot of sense, being (fake?)-compulsioned into eating isn't an action or a decision any more than not that, and he doesn't have preferences about things that are just different states of the world. Nonetheless his brain is generating a lot of panic about this, which he doesn't make much effort to hide because what's the point.
"Do you think I should be trying to keep him calm?" murmurs Bella. "I don't even know how freaked out he is, I'm not checking, but I know you draw the lines a lot differently than I would -"
This is such an odd hypothetical to be trying to entertain. "I think my endorsed preference would be that you check? I am getting the sense that he is very scared, but he is thinking about it very oddly and I do not actually have Empathy so it is hard to judge."
She checks. "Yeah he's super panicky, leave it or push back or cancel it altogether?"
"I am finished now, so we could wait and see if he calms down once I have stopped doing things to his head?"
Leareth isn't trying to calm down deliberately, doing anything on purpose isn't safe, but if the situation stops changing then over five or ten minutes he'll gradually go back to his background state, which is moderately stressed but also pretty detached from it and not having very many thoughts.